Betrayed by his own daughter.
Forget North Korea. Forget talk of treason and alleged collusion with the Russians. Forget the size of his fingers and the size of his nuclear button.
If President Donald Trump is sensitive about one thing, it is the strange mass of matter—human or otherwise—that adorns the top of his head.
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Is this hair real? A comb-over? How much of it is there? Where does it begin? Where does it end? What is its true color? Is it really a domesticated pet? Does it bite?
The mystery of Donald Trump’s hair (“style” would be an over-reach), so long contested, may have finally been solved by his daughter Ivanka Trump—at the same as she reportedly mocks her father’s hair affair to friends.
As reported by Michael Wolff in his new book about President Trump’s first year in office, Fire and Fury: Inside Trump’s White House, we learn that it is Trump’s beloved daughter that leads the chorus of those who mock the Trump “do” (or “don’t’).
“She treated her father with a degree of detachment, even irony, going so far as to make fun of his comb-over to others,” Wolff writes, as extracted in New York magazine. “She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate—a contained island after scalp-reduction surgery—surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray.”
So, Trump has had surgery on his head because he thought it was too big, and yet his fingers remain so frustratingly small? The hair would not be bidden or calmed. It stayed like determined Triffids, then surrounded the pate and laid it to siege. Be warned, Rocket Man: Trump fought back.
If only Trump could unite the country with the same, determined focus as he diligently gathers those disparate clumps and strands of hair together every day.
From every corner of his allegedly surgically altered scalp he carefully marshals them, and then in one dramatic move he sweeps as much as he can back and fixes it in place.
Every morning, Trump is his own ’60s housewife, wrestling his bouffant to prettified submission.
The only method of control for these wanton tendrils: spray, and more spray.
Ivanka Sassoon wasn’t done.
“The color, she would point out to comical effect,” Woolf continues, “was from a product called Just for Men—the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond hair color.”
This would explain why Trump’s hair flows like the world’s maddest orange river, north, south, east, and west; the reason for its many tones of white, blonde, and orange.
It also explains why Trump’s hair goes left, right, front, and back: a rollercoaster ride that even the greatest brains at Six Flags could not construct.
This also explains Trump’s hair’s only minimal capitulation to natural forces. Wind is its declared enemy: it will not move for wind. When the wind comes, the Trump hair hunkers down. On the rare occasion the wind has not been briefed about his presence beforehand and comes at him too strong, Trump’s hair explodes in all directions: He could be Tippi Hedren’s stunt double in the most intense scenes of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
Trump’s hair lusts after, it needs—more than Joanie needed Chachi and Oreos need milk—a plush, windless interior, preferably one whose golden cherubs and railings and shiny picture frames match and reflect Trump’s flowing peak of whipped and calmed orange.
According to his daughter, Trump’s hair is under as much siege as his White House. But at least Ivanka’s explanation—even if it was done to mock her father to others—offers a persuasive physical explanation to one of the more alarming wonders of the modern world.
When my former colleague Justin Jones and I investigated this hair-tugging mystery in 2015, we were met with a frosted-tipped wall of silence. But many who spoke to us for that article knew at least elements of the truth: the spraying, the dye jobs, the daily, desperate tugging to get the Trump rug into place.
Trump once pulled on his crowning glory in front of a Telegraph journalist. It’s real, it’s not a hairpiece, he insisted. And now these shattering follicle-based revelations, from the joking mouth of his very own daughter: the struggle on top of Donald Trump’s head is indeed real.
